Like Seattle’s latest exotic dancer law, Sun Microsystems has gone “contactless” with its new Java Card platform, which eliminates the need for making contact with a Java Card reader. The contactless smart card can be read up to four inches (10 cm) away, enabling applications in rigorous environments such as public transportation or gaining access to government facilities.

They have the phone component in place from their purchase of Skype, and now eBay wants all the listings it can get to be the online resource for local search.

Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages… We are proud to welcome you to the one, the only, the uniquely meglomartical Yahoo Shoposphere!

When Google faces off against foes of its Print project at the New York Public Library tonight, it will be in front of an audience in a sold-out venue.

Google has opened up its massive server farms to host user-submitted content that it will index and make searchable. The company opened up Google Base to users today.

Lots of great information floats around at conferences, particularly good ones like PubCon. Our editor, Mike McDonald, attended the seminar on writing copy for search engines and picked up some great tips to pass along in order to help get the most out of copy when building your Internet strategy.

Massive demand for prime placement on sites like MSN, Yahoo, and AOL means rates have skyrocketed, advertisers have to plan out campaigns well in advance, and smaller niche sites are profiting from the overflow.

The potential as well as the rapid early adoption of the podcast has the Internet industry buzzing to the point that some media aficionados are singing the dirges of print and traditional radio. At the forefront of the phenomenon is WebmasterRadioFM, a company that is developing the kind of artificial intelligence capable of spidering mp3 files for indexing. Yes, spiders with ears.

Matt Cutts of Google stated at PubCon: “There are some things in our infrastructure that can be perceived as a sandbox.” So…. yes, the Google sandbox does exist to some extent, but is probably not as widespread as thought.

Matt Cutts of Google stated at PubCon that the data collected from Google Analytics will probably not be utilized to improve search results. I speculated on this in an earlier post. He also commented on privacy implications, ” In my …

Put the flamethrowers down, folks; Zawodny referred to his site as “my dumb blog” and discussed the joys and perils associated with blogging at Yahoo. Rich Ord sent along details of Zawodny’s talk at PubCon.

Last night Yahoo had a mixer at Caesar’s club, Pure. Of course, Rich and I attended solely out of our journalistic sense of duty.

In early 2006, an initiative backed by the two Internet portals will require developers to prove their software can be user-friendly and easy to uninstall before being certified as such by a new anti-spyware initiative.

With Congress likely to exclude bloggers from the same protection afforded journalists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has begun a fundraising campaign to help with the potentially nasty legal impact on bloggers.

The portal company will include stories from Gawker Media blogs throughout its network of sites.

Open Source Media (OSM) launched their new web portal for bringing together online writers, journalists and commenters under their umbrella. The debut happened today and they are loaded with celebrity pundits from across the board.

Our publisher and CEO, Rich Ord, is spending quality time at the tables in Vegas, but he’s nowhere near the casinos. He’s listening to industry gurus Greg Jarboe and Jeremy Zawodny talk about making the most out of RSS and podcasts.

A member of a Denver Linux development shop wonders why Google hasn’t made its applications available for Linux systems.

An agreement was reached at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, Tunisia late Tuesday night whereby the United States, through quasi-independent Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will remain in control of the Internet’s root servers and addressing system.

Dell announced the release of a comprehensive database featuring its quad-socket PowerEdge servers with new Intel Xeon dual-core technology and the new Microsoft SQL Server database. The package is intended to simplify migration to Microsoft SQL Server database and business-critical data center operations.

Online shoppers have no sympathy for crappy web design and if the utility of your website doesn’t impress, they ain’t stickin’ around and they ain’t comin’ back. A new survey released Monday suggests than 89% of online shoppers have experienced problems making online transactions. One-third said problematic websites turn their coveted eyeballs to competitors.

If you have a spare $1,895 sitting around, you might want to consider spending November 30 and December 1 in New York at Fortune magazine’s Innovation Forum.